Army Says Farewell To General McChrystal

Stanley McChrystal stepped onto Fort McNair in southwest Washington D.C. on Friday as a four-star general of the U.S. Army, distinguished as a special operator and a counterinsurgent commander but brought down as an indiscreet subject of a magazine profile. He left Fort McNair this afternoon as a civilian, moving on to an uncertain future.

His tenure in command of the Afghanistan war hasn’t had time to show definitive results — either successes or failures — making him the rare commander not to be dismissed for his wartime performance. Accordingly, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Washington, Said Tayeb Jawad, relayed from Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, that McChrystal “laid the foundation for our final triumph.” Not much more could be said.

But McChrystal, who showed up to the ceremony in his combat uniform, said he didn’t want to let his remarks grow awkward. He actively joked about his situation, warning those in attendance who were inclined to contradict his war stories that he had files and photos on some of them, “and I know a Rolling Stone reporter.” He kept joking about issuing a Tactical Directive to his wife, Annie, about his famously spartan lifestyle of early morning physical training and eating one meal a day. Alas, she represents an “insurgency of one woman,” McChrystal continued, hamming it up, but the enemy is “uninterested in reconciliation.” He turned to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and said that subduing her would take “at least 40,000 troops.”

But he grew more serious and reflective. McChrystal’s voice caught once while delivering his remarks: when he honored the comradeship of his fellow warriors, “the greatest honor in my career.” While he was perceived to be disrespectful to the Obama administration in his Rolling Stone profile, he paid his tribute to the “civilian and military leaders of our nation… beginning with President Obama.” When it came to Afghanistan — after Jawad awarded him the country’s highest medal — McChrystal said his tenure in command convinced him “the Afghans have the courage, the strength, and the resiliency” to prove “equal to the task.”

Gates honored McChrystal as a “consummate Ranger,” honoring reputation as a scholar and as a warrior. “No single American has inflicted more fear and more loss of life on our country’s enemies than Stan McChrystal,” Gates said. In Iraq, when McChrystal led the Joint Special Operations Command, “night by night, intercept by intercept, cell by cell, [he] first confronted and then crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq, a campagin well underway before the surge ,when violence seemed unstoppable.” His performance made McChrystal Gates’s choice to lead the Afghanistan war when President Obama decided on his new strategy last year.

General George Casey, the chief of staff of the Army, noted that McChrystal’s official Army record shows nearly 34 years of dwell time between deployments — an indication of just how secretive McChrystal’s career has been. According to Casey, when McChrystal led JSOC to a successful manhunt for al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, McChrystal had Zarqawi’s corpse brought to his headquarters for personal inspection.

It’s not clear what the 56-year old McChrystal will do next. Marc Ambinder reports he’s already declined a lucrative offer to join the Beltway consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Riffing off an anecdote relayed in the magazine piece that led him to the podium on Friday about using an Italian high-end clothier as a shorthand for putting on airs, McChrystal joked about becoming a “spokesman for Gucci, but they haven’t called.”

McChrystal ended his remarks, and his Army career, by quoting the Spartan king Leonidas and Winston Churchill to express his commitment to the spirit of service. “Caution and cynicism is safe, but soldiers don’t want to follow cautious cynics,” McChrystal said. “I’d do somethings in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people, and I still believe in them. I trusted, and I still trust. I cared, and I still care. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”